Canvas Commons should behave like Blueprints when updating content to a Canvas course
Changed the update behavior of Shared Commons to behave like Blueprints.
Updating a Shared Commons today creates copy's of the files in the courses that are using the Shared Commons. This results in the files root gets cluttered and users will see a lot of unused files, the user experience becomes bad.
The data consistency will also be affected as courses will have different versions of the files with different names depending on when they actually update the Shared Commons packaged for the specific course. This means that in one course the latest file can be named DemoDoc-4.docx and in another it can be named DemoDoc-1.docx but the files are actually the same.
I do not understand why you want to implement two different solution that are basically doing the same thing but in different ways, i do not see the benefit of this. Blueprints is the more logic solution here and the same ability's should be re-used on the Shared Commons to create a better overall handling of files and user experience.
When updating a Blueprint you do not have the issue of creating duplicates of the files, resulting into multiple files visible on the files structure.
When uploading a new file you are asked if you want to overwrite that file or create a new, the default behavior is to overwrite if using the API.
Explanation of the behavior of Shared Commons below.
I have used Blueprints before and the default behavior is when I upload a new version of file it overwrites the file with the same filename, I then sync the courses that needs the file and the file is overwritten in the courses with the updated version.
But when using a module from a Shared Commons this is not the behavior, instead it actually creates new files in the course root files folder each time you update the Shared Commons modules.
So each time I updated a Shared Commons to a course it will generate new files in the course files root folder. I excepted it to behave like the blueprint sync where it overwrites the files with the same file name instead of adding copy's each time.
Image below shows what the Shared Commons module contains.
Files in the Shared Commons module
Image below shows a course root files after the Shared Commons module have been updated.
Instead of overwriting the files it adds a copy with the added numbers -1, next time i update a file in teh Shared Commons modules the course will get a file named -2 and so on.
Image shows second time I updated the Shared Commons module. Displays the root files in a course that uses the Shared Commons module. Now displaying -2 in file names and keeping files -1 and original file.
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